Just Add Water

Water is one of the most common substances in our experience. It is easy to take for granted the remarkable properties of this substance. Enjoy watching Peter Wothers enlighten us with surprising and impressive demonstrations using this amazing substance. Notice how the many chemical principles we have been learning come into play.

Building Atoms

Your teacher has created a new SMART Board notebook that allows you to build atoms from the bottom up by stacking orbitals. If you are interested in trying it, download the file aufbau.notebook to your computer, and open it with SMART Notebook Express. SMART Notebook Express does not quite have all the functionality needed to expand the images, but keep checking -- their website says they are upgrading it all the time.

If you want to explore the shapes of orbitals, check out the free Orbital Viewer software. It's fun to play with the atom parameters and see all the different shapes the orbitals can take.

Podcasts from the American Chemical Society

The American Chemical Society produces several podcast series of interest to chemistry students. The Global Challenges series highlights the impact of chemistry in dealing with global issues like health, hunger, energy, and the environment. The Science Elements series highlights cutting edge research in chemistry. The Bytesize Science series reports on developments from the American Chemical Society's 36 journals in a form well suited for young people.

Check out these links directly, or refer to the RSS feeds in the margin of this page. Listen to some of the podcasts to find out how fast and how broadly the development of chemistry progresses. It is an exciting field for young people to consider for their life's work.

Common Laboratory Apparatus

Enjoy a quick review of some common laboratory equipment over mood music...




Credits for images can be round in the lesson plan for this iPhoto slideshow.

Using Chemistry to Find Alien Life

Life is a complex chemical system. So what better way to discover alien life on planets outside our solar system than by using chemical methodologies. Of course we can't send a chemistry lab to a planet circling around another star far from our Sun. But we can use the science of spectroscopy to study the electromagnetic radiation that arrives to our Earth from distant planets. That is exactly what Garik Israelian is doing. Listen to him explain how the technology of spectroscopy can be used to detect alien life on planets far, far from here...

Comments from students on this post are welcome and invited!

ChemSpider

ChemSpider is a free web site that allows you to look up the chemical structure of countless molecules. Check it out! Search a molecule of you choice, and the site will show you the molecular structure in two dimensions. Click on the 3D tab, and it opens a new window with the structure in three dimensions! Use your mouse to rotate the structure and get a better look from any angle. Right-click on the 3D image for more options.

Check out this 3D structure of testosterone.

Models of the Atom

The idea of the atom has a long history. Enjoy this podcast for a brief overview of the development of the model of the atom from the time of the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus to today. See images of the key scientists involved in the development of the model, as well as images of the shapes of some representative atomic orbitals.

Image credits can be found in the lesson plan for this podcast. Texts of the abridged script and full script are also available.